• Distribution

    S.P.K. – Desvaír

    febrero 5, 2022

    Selective Pornographi Kontrol

    S.P.K. – Despair
    Label: Twin Vision – VIDSSPKTV1, CaTV – VIDSSPKTV1
    Format: DVD, DVD-Video, Reissue, Remastered, PAL
    Country: UK
    Released: 2008
    Style: Interview, Industrial, Noise

    /// SOLD OUT ///

    In 1982, SPK issued their ‘music’ video, Despair. Sold mainly via mail order, Despair quickly asserted itself as something of a cult item on the underground when publications such as Re/Search #10: Incredibly Strange Films began to plug it. In that volume, Frank Henenlotter, director of Basket Case, said: «When I saw the video I thought, ‘What a fabulous thing; what a strange way of using music. Who would make a music video to such horror – with actual severed heads…'» Despair consists of 60 minutes of screeching, heavily distorted guitars, electronics, and various tape and vocal effects. The graphics mutate from a series of lines running up and down the screen, into a seemingly random cut-up of images, like scenes of a sex-shop, or an autopsy. The soundtrack drives onward, relentlessly. Sequences showing the mutilation of a dead cat (its eye gouged out and its tongue sliced off) and the unspooling of intestines from a cadaver’s gaping abdominal cavity, are intercut with footage of SPK performing live. The frontman, in bondage mask and swastika armband, bites meat from a rancid horse’s head. Slides of death camps, brain operations, foetal deformities and pathological specimens take the video to its conclusion and infamous mortuary footage. An individual, seen only as a pair of industrial-gloved hands, manoeuvres a detached head to perform clumsy fellatio on a penis protruding from the severed, lower extremities of a corpse. The head is replaced by a skeletal hand, woven with strings of yellowed tendon and gristle. This appendage simulates masturbation of the grey member. Hailing from Australia, SPK were one of the first wave of industrial noise groups. Throbbing Gristle’s label, Industrial Records, put out a 7″ EP of theirs (one track of which, Slogan, appears on the video) and rumours abound that band members
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  • CD,  Distribution

    GASPAROTTI · CIULLINI · STANCATI – PORTRAITS

    septiembre 5, 2021

    Gasparotti · Ciullini · Stancati – Portraits
    Label: Unexplained Sounds Group ‎– USG069
    Format: CD, Limited Edition, Stereo
    Country: Italy
    Released: 04 Jun 2021
    Style: Electroacoustic, Drone, Experimental, Berlin-School, Ambient

    Portraits is a new series from Unexplained Sounds Group focusing on electronic and electro-acoustic music composers. Each release creates a ‘portrait’ of three musicians by showcasing representative pieces of their recent musical journeys, serving as a guide for further listening and a means of exploring their work. This first volume is dedicated to three Italian musicians: Gabriele Gasparotti, Daniele Ciullini, and Mario Lino Stancati. Gasparotti and Stancati are among the most talented emerging musicians on the Italian experimental scene, while Ciullini is a veteran of the post-industrial underground who, after a very long silence, returned to music in 2012.

    GABRIELE GASPAROTTI

    Gabriele Gasparotti (05/09/1987) composes electroacoustic music on analog instruments. He is the creator of the project Extrema Ratio (music inspired by the script of Alberto Cavallone’s lost movie Maldoror – Il dio selvaggio) and of the artistic collective Gasparotti Muga Muchū Morphing Theater – a multimedia project that aims at the interaction between music and the performative arts and is deeply influenced by surrealism and esoterism. His video La nascita di Zelda v. 2.0 (Zelda’s Birth v. 2.0) was screened at the 76th Venice International Film Festival in the section Il futuro del corto d’autore (The Future of Art Shorts). He is the founder of the record label Il Dio Selvaggio and his latest album is Istantanee vol.1 (Il Dio Selvaggio, Dio Drone, Dornwald).

    soundcloud.com/gabriele-gasparotti

    DANIELE CIULLINI

    Active since the 80s in the area of the tape-network with some self-productions and participations in compilations of labels and fanzines of the time, after a iatus lasting about thirty years, Daniele Ciullini returns to the music and live sets. His recent works were published by Luce Sia and Silentes. Unexplained Sounds Group presents some unreleased tracks made by using toy instruments, field recordings and automatic voices.

    soundcloud.com/danieleciullini

    MARIO LINO STANCATI

    Mario Lino Stancati (Italy, 1981) graduated in «Disciplines of the Arts, Music and Theater». He is an actor, director, playwright, poet, musician and composer.Not chained to any individual musical genre (he crosses progressive ambient, concrete music and avant-garde composition) and motivated to explore any form of experimentation with music, he developed methodologies and expressive practices capable of merging both vocal performativity and guitar playing.

    soundcloud.com/mariolinostancati  

    REVIEW

    Vital Weekly→

    The three-way compilation is a compilation form I actually like, especially if the three projects/musicians get the space a CD allows; well, twenty minutes each. Here we have three Italian composers, each granted four pieces. I had only heard of Danielle Ciullini before; he recently released a work after a long time of silence and first heard on releases by Trax (Vital Weekly 1254). There are short biographies on the cover of the CD, to pique your further interests. The CD starts with the quartet of pieces by Gabriele Gasparotti, the youngest of the three. He «composes electroacoustic music on analogue instruments». In his music drones play certainly a role, generated from mainly guitars, but also effects or keyboards and throughout there is quite some variation to be noted. The music is a bit dark, quite spacious, with a touch of cosmic music. Sometimes a bit too freaky, but that gives it also a free-spirited edge.
    The next four pieces are by Mario Lino Stancati (1981), who is an actor, director, playwright, poet, musician and composer. I believe the guitar plays an important role, next to voices, but a fair share of the legwork here is done using electronic processing. It might be his work with theatre that prompted him to add this vocal stuff (not in all pieces), which, for me, adds a bit of a gothic edge to the music. Perhaps, so I thought, this is something of an Italian tradition, along the lines of Ain Soph (especially in ‘Magma Crecia’). His music certainly is touched by a darker force of a mytikal origin, as I am sure this should be spelt.
    The final four are by Daniele Ciullini, knows for his work with Trax in the 80s. In his pieces he works with massive ambient passages, maybe derived from heavily processed field recordings, versus otherwise heavily treated acoustic sounds, reminiscent from the world of musique concrète. Curiously, his four pieces sound like one long collage of music, with the odd start and stop cues. Strictly personally speaking I was most fond of his work from these three, even when I enjoyed much of the others too. The way Ciullini worked with various musical interests I enjoyed a lot. (FdW)

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  • CD,  Distribution

    RHAD ‎– METAMUSIC

    septiembre 4, 2021

    RhaD – METAMUSIC
    Label: Unexplained Sounds Group ‎– USG066
    Format: CD, Album, Stereo
    Country: Italy
    Released: 18 Jun 2021
    Style: Musique Concrète, Experimental, Abstract

    RHaD (Research for Historical Audio Documents) is a side project of Raffaele Pezzella (better known as Sonologyst). What Pezzella brings us here is a concrete example of something of what I have always believed – that ALL sound is music, whatever its source (radio transmissions, telephonic conversations, hi-fi test signals, old and forgotten documentaries, unknown field recordists). More than that, there is something else that goes beyond the simple creation of seemingly random sound collages; there is no doubt that here we have the uncovering of secret worlds and other realities, existences parallel to ours and yet separated by vast temporal and spatial distances. Here we have recordings and found sounds that have been manipulated in such a way as to render their contexts irrelevant and meaningless. Subtle concatenations of sound and substance, mood and context, in some instances creating a sense of otherness, that what we’re hearing are broadcasts from dimensions and realities that are not the one we live in. It’s exactly like trying to tune into a specific station on a vintage radio set but you don’t quite know where it is: as you turn the dial this way and that, you catch glimpses of other lives and other existences playing out just like your own. They are of our world and yet not part of it either. These six “metasonic” messages from seemingly emanate from an unknown Otherwhere and that alone will entice us to listen further and more deeply, in the hope of catching something that will peel back the layers and give us what we’ve yearned for. And that, I think, is where the true beauty lies in this album.

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